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“... the words ‘bitter’ and ‘dependable’. In ‘Remembering Malibu’, a poem addressed to Brian Moore, he writes of the island monastic site of Great Skellig:                      the steps cut in the rockI never climbedbetween the graveyard and the boatslipare welted solid to my instep.Again, that ‘cutting edge’ between ‘I ...”

“... or watching it is ‘like going on a journey’. But by taking a close look at the six volumes of Brian Vickers’s Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Bate shows that one John Potter had stoutly defended the play’s oddities many years earlier in the Theatrical Review. The real aficionados had always been enlightening and surprising in their championship of ...”

“... friend: ‘Five rows in front of me all in a row were Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller, Ladybird, Ford, Mrs Carter and Mondale. Somehow these political stars all seem to be like dwarfs when you see them in the flesh. However, I had a wonderful suite at the Shoreham and everybody seemed to use Tanqueray in the Dry Martinis.’ He wrote to writers whom he ...”

“... Georgia had just tipped 1400 votes in favour of Joe Biden. If Georgia’s arch-villain governor, Brian Kemp, had still been in charge of our state elections as he was in 2016, he would have personally eaten those 1400 votes and died at the vet’s of an obstructed bowel, rather than let that happen. But the unthinkable had come to pass: Georgia had gone ...”

“... Chichester, visits by Samuel Pepys, location work for the latest Jane Austen or for Harrison Ford (more bombs) in Patriot Games – are trumpeted, while the dark history of the Greenwich marshes, a decayed industrial wilderness, is brutally elided. The tongue of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film set, banqueting ...”

“... 1970s that Russia was aiming not at missile parity but at actual superiority. Not until President Ford established the so-called ‘B Team’ of outside analysts under the Harvard historian Richard Pipes did the extent of earlier underestimates become clear. Part of the United States problem in interpreting Soviet intentions arose from the old intelligence ...”

“... dared to write congratulating Leavis on his CH (‘Dead Sea fruit’, said his wife). Boris Ford was accused of killing Scrutiny off by stealing its contributors for the Penguin Guide to English Literature. Few friends, however loyal, escaped. Wilfrid Mellers, H.A. Mason and others all fell foul of him in one way or another. As to his enemies, the ...”

“... in action’ during the 1970s, when holidays brought together the Heaneys, the Hammonds, Deane, Brian Friel and John Hume; there is a book to be written about those summers and their consequences, in politics and in the arts.But Heaney’s debts to music pre-date Hammond, and extend far beyond his example. A blind musician, Rosie Keenan (remembered in the ...”

“... North Korea’ with fire and fury was a rhetorically extreme example in a long record. Eisenhower, Ford and Clinton all made similar threats. In response to North Korean missile tests, the US twice fired conventional missiles from South Korea into the Sea of Japan. In 2019, it withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The Trump administration ...”

“... there may continue to be minor alarums, such as the recent spat over the entry for Patrick O’Brian). Nonetheless, a not dissimilar kind of sleep-disturbing responsibility fell on its editor, and the project was fortunate to find the ideal man for the job in the Oxford historian Colin Matthew, who had demonstrated his capacity for the task in his ...”

“... them and undermined the resolve of many employers, who decided the policy was unsustainable. Ford was one of the first to break the terms of the agreement and Callaghan, who was trying to manage a minority government, lacked the votes in Parliament to impose sanctions. On 12 December the public sector unions rejected the government’s pay deal, which ...”

“... A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly employed on the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Dagenham, contacted me to pass on his research into a tunnel he claimed to have discovered running from Sutton House, a Tudor mansion on the ridge above the culverted Hackney Brook, to a church on the other side of the River Lea. There was ...”

“... Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. Like millions of Americans, I listened to Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a story about something painful, squalid and chilling that had happened to her when she was fifteen. Her story reminded me of Elena’s book tour, and my own: a grown woman having to appear before a large ...”